


Incomplete Nature

by marzanna



Category: The Outer Worlds (Video Game)
Genre: Fictional Religion & Theology, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Internalized Homophobia, Introspection, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-13
Updated: 2019-12-06
Packaged: 2021-01-25 19:37:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21361597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marzanna/pseuds/marzanna
Summary: (adj.) ententional - The property of being intrinsically incomplete in the sense of being in relationship to, constituted by, or organized to achieve something non-intrinsic.It’s through the efforts of one Maximillian DeSoto that the secrets of the universe will finally be laid bare, the Plan realized, and the struggle to find one’s purpose ended once and for all. In theory. It’s a bit of a work in progress.
Relationships: The Captain/Maximillian DeSoto
Comments: 22
Kudos: 63





	1. L'Etranger

**Author's Note:**

> happy nanowrimo, everybody. i could have written a novel or something but i decided to write this fic instead. the premise is, "sure, vicar max is hot, but you know what would be even hotter? obliterating his entire belief system. and also making him wear a tank top"
> 
> rating and tags will change as this is updated. there will be a lot of, uh, violent enthusiasm.
> 
> this work (and the title) references one of my favorite texts, "Incomplete Nature" by terrence deacon. it can be a little dense but it's a fascinating read. i hope to god he never learns that this fic exists

_(n.) teleology - The study of purposive or end-directed relationships, philosophically related to Aristotle’s concept of a “final cause”._

The universe is said to be commanded by one Law, and one Law alone - a single, unifying equation that binds together the sum of human knowledge. From the nascent particles of the Big Bang, through the origins of life and purpose, all the way down to the day-to-day interactions of colonists in a backwater port of a backwater planet, all these things and more are predictable through the knowledge of sheer particle interaction. Theoretically.

Theories are well and good. The trickier part is putting them into practice. So far, humankind has struggled to nail down the specifics of the dynamical fabric of the living world, though not for lack of trying. It’s through the efforts of the OSI that our current theories about matter and mind are developed and catalogued. It’s through their efforts that humanity can mold materials into fantastical shapes and forms, giving birth to civilization and the colonial industry and a delicious variety of Rizzo’s-brand treats.

And it’s through the efforts of one Maximillian DeSoto that the secrets of the universe will finally be laid bare, the Plan realized, and the struggle to find one’s purpose ended once and for all. In theory. It’s a bit of a work in progress.

* * *

There’s something to be said about the night time in Edgewater. The heat of the day concentrates itself in the cannery’s shiny metal walls, where it ferments saltuna’s already-distasteful smell into a fetid stink like that the vicar imagines from ancient pools of garum, and he has the distinct pleasure of spending his waking hours immediately downwind. It comes as a relief, then, when the air cools and the winds shift and Edgewater smells a little less provincial.

Not much else changes, though. The second shift gets replaced with the third shift, which has gone from a full-bodied outfit of a few dozen or so to a handful of pallid men with names like “Crom” and “Bunt”. And sweaty, too, just the same going in as coming out. Locals rotate out of the watering hole and into their bunks. Come the crack of dawn, they’ll rotate back around, and Max will return to his own post to listen to the same troubled minds that cross his door every morning. It’s all very… quaint. Routine. Predictability has its benefits. A shiv to the ribs is not as easy to predict, although not impossible, as he proves by closing the door to the rectory with all of his blood and organs still inside him.

So it goes. Morning comes and goes again. Another body takes a one-way trip through Edgewater’s gates. As usual, Max is there to supply final rites, say a few nice words, that sort of thing. By now the rest of the town doesn’t bother lingering much when he does, so he keeps it short. The Plan works in mysterious ways, and sometimes, he supposes aloud, that plan is full of plague and suffering. That’s life, dear.

The one woman in attendance stops crying into her dirty handkerchief and stares at him long enough that he doesn’t believe he nailed that one. There’s always next time, he supposes.

It’s a living, and it’s a small sacrifice to make, in his estimation. Max has grown to tolerate his circumstances. Suffering was considered noble in many defunct religions, and what great agony was a little boredom and lack of enrichment in the grand scheme of things? He can be patient. He’s come this far, and he is so, so close to a breakthrough. He just needs to get his hands on that book. Leaving Edgewater isn’t as easy as it sounds, however, and even if Max were desperate enough to go looking for it himself, there’s been a vicar shortage of sorts in this part of the colony. It’s best if he keeps himself in one piece.

There is hope yet. The Plan is ineffable, mostly, but everything ends up where it ought in the end. Something just has to align in the structure of the universe. He must be here for a purpose, and that purpose will realize itself if he has faith. It has to.

And then, on the 52nd day of repeating this to himself, a distant unrealized end coalesces and brings the Stranger to his door, with Ms. Holcomb attempting to hide behind him.

Not her best choice. The Stranger draws the gazes of nearby parishioners like a magnet, which only makes her shrink in further upon herself. It’s easy to see why - he commands attention, tall and leggy and housed in a grey bodysuit the likes of which Max has never seen before. _What would those hoses be used for in the first place?_ But it’s the eyes that stand out the most, a cutting purple that couldn’t be anything but man-made. Max imagines he can hear them clicking and whirring like automechanicals as they take a once-over of the temple. They alight on him.

“Now there’s something you don’t see every day,” Max says as they approach his desk. “Ms. Holcomb. And a new friend.”

“Oh. I-I’m not his friend— I mean, he’s not my friend. Yet. Wow, uh, that’s not what I mean,” Parvati stammers. One of her hands tugs at her handkerchief. Idly, he worries that if she gets any paler she’ll pass out in front of the Law and everyone.

The Stranger clears his throat. Up close, Max can make out the faint edges of a scar bisecting his right eye. Curious, how well it blends in when one’s too busy taking in, well, everything else. “You must be the vicar. I’m in kind of a situation right now, and Parvati thinks we could use your advice.”

“A situation. You’d be surprised how many of those I’m asked to deal with,” he says. “Well, lay it on me. I specialize in confessionals, but I can also do moral quandaries, ontological questions, and tossball predictions.”

This is how Max comes to learn several things. For one, the Stranger does have a name: Alex Hawthorne. For another, he doesn’t even know what _tossball_ is. That’s practically refreshing, compared to the usual type of blasphemy Max runs into. Lastly, he learns that though the gears of fate turn in mysterious ways, they do turn eventually, and they’ve dropped the solution to his current conundrum into his lap. As he had faith they would.

* * *

The crux of the conundrum is this: Some thing, some event unleashed the universe and all the matter therein. Some speak of a watchmaker, or Architect, that, upon completion of its task, wiped its hands clean and left the results to tick interminably thereafter. (The OSI remains officially agnostic on the matter, but it does make good arguing material for its clergy.) In a way, creation was the ultimate experiment. Shake together the ingredients and see what happens. The one Law provides the constraints that shape the way particles interact, and, to a more enlightened people, enable prediction of their future paths.

It’s nothing but physical science all the way down. In the past, many specializations of science emerged, each with their own unique rules and theories, but their descriptions of the physical world can be compared to a group attempting to describe an elephant based on local feel alone. They lack synthesis into a cohesive whole. That’s the classic orthodox question in search of an answer. But the more heterodox question lies among the contraband Max has just made a risky play to get.

It is commonly accepted that there is no magic in the universe. There are no gods, no demons, and no homunculi lingering unseen in the brains of man. That said, if all things in the world can be reduced to specific arrangements of atoms, and nothing else, how does one explain the material impact of the written word? Stripped of meaning, a word is just ink on paper, thixotropic gel in a matrix of pulp. All physical stuff. It means nothing without context. But “context” and “meaning” and other such things are concepts without physical presence, which, by definition, shouldn’t be present in the universe. “Value” can’t be directly measured with any type of meter, although that doesn’t stop Spacer’s Choice from trying.

According to OSI scripture, these abstract concepts are nothing more than epiphenomenal glosses. Like an anthropocentric filter on processes inherently devoid of teleology. Max has to admit he finds this unsatisfying. The Plan may have systematically excised any worry about _telos_ \- ends and purpose - from human life, but it has left many other non-physical loose ends like _function_ and _meaning_ uncut. After all, if meaning was irrelevant to one’s acts in the Plan, there wouldn’t be a need to ban books like Bakonu’s journal in the first place. A word would not be quite so dangerous.

What’s missing is, inexplicably, something missing. About-ness. The state of being functionally incomplete without reference to something else. Without these absential properties, life reduces to mere mechanism, and if that’s the case, then why bother acting? Doing? Striving toward ends, fighting the Plan at every turn? _Why is he trying so hard?_

He doesn’t have a neat answer to that one yet, despite many long nights of research and philosophical agonizing. But, if everything goes according to plan, he should get a little closer to one, and the rest of the institute won’t need to know about his… dalliances.

Unfortunately, everything does not go according to plan.

The first indication comes some days later when the power abruptly winks out across Edgewater. In the darkness, Max looks up from his work at nothing, until the emergency lights flicker on and fill the temple with muted red light. An eerie quiet rolls in like a fog. He realizes that it’s the cannery’s characteristic belching and chugging that’s missing, for the first time since he arrived. And in that moment, he also realizes that this is the sound of a town that has just died and doesn’t know it yet.

That son of a bitch actually went and did it, then. In the back of his mind, Max had imagined that the Stranger would have a particular way of words, and that he would be able to do what Tobson couldn’t - to reunite the two struggling factions of the Emerald Vale. Optimistic, sure, but not out of the realm of possibility. Until now. Distantly, Max knows he should feel angry, at least on behalf of the townsfolk, but he doesn’t. Instead there’s a weird calmness settling over him. It propels him to pack up his literature and research before dawn breaks. Something tells him it would be wise.

Come morning, the harbinger of their fate strolls through the temple entrance, unperturbed and covered in a frightening amount of blood. Max immediately stops what he’s doing and stares.

“It’s not mine,” Hawthorne says by way of greeting.

“That’s- that’s not what I was worried about.”

Parvati follows him in, walking straighter than the last time they met, and she’s in a similar state of cleanliness. Max eyes the dark, squelching footprints they leave on the floorboards with distaste. They’re hardwood, for goodness’ sake. “Uh, sorry about the mess, Mr. Vicar,” she offers.

He opens his mouth. Then he shuts it and takes a deep breath to center himself. With effort, he says, “Don’t worry about it. Just tell me, did you get the book?”

“You mean this?” Hawthorne wipes a hand on a less-dirty segment of his bodysuit and pulls a thin blue journal out of his pack, which he tosses toward Max rather than handing over like a civilized human being. Before he can think about it, his hand snaps out to intercept it. “Ooh, nice reflexes. This wasn’t too easy to get a hold of, you know. I almost blew my leg off.”

That should sound questionable, or even concerning, but the words go in one ear and out the other because _finally_ he has the _book_. A little tremor overcomes him as he opens the journal, flips through it… and…

“What the fuck is this? Is this… French? I can’t fucking read French! What a Law-forsaken joke! I spent years in this miserable, swampy hole in the ground, and for what? This?” He throws it onto his desk, where it lands with a disconcertingly loud slap. “Figures. I was so high and mighty, preaching about law and order and following the Plan while fighting it at every turn. This is only what I deserve.”

Hawthorne folds his arms and frowns. “This seems like an overreaction. It’s just one book, Vicar.”

“Just one book? You don’t understand. Seeking out this ‘one book’ was a major part of my life’s work! I was this close to unraveling the mysteries of the universe with the help of rare texts like this, but the Architect clearly has different plans for me,” Max snaps, voice dripping with bitterness.

“And you’re telling me there isn’t a single person in this colony who can read French?”

“How the hell should I know!”

“Hey, c’mon now,” Parvati interjects, stepping in between the two of them. “Let’s not be gettin’ all at each other’s throats, here. Maybe we could help you get it translated. My dad taught me some French, you know, stuff about ‘fromages’ and ‘omelettes’? I could give it a whack.”

Max rests his head in his hands, groans into his palms, and then pushes them up his face and through his hair. “No, Ms. Holcomb, you’ve done quite enough for me already, thanks,” he forces out with as much kindness as he can muster.

“She has a point. You need a translator, I’ve got a ship. And I think I’ll be needing a bigger crew sooner rather than later. We could work something out,” Hawthorne says.

And, somehow, it really is as easy as that. One day, he’s an underworked vicar with a shitty contract and Parvati’s an overworked scion of the Spacer’s Choice family, and the next, those bonds evaporate into thin air. Just because Hawthorne _says_ so. This has to be the Architect at work, he realizes, strings pulled behind the scenes at some long-distant point in the past to bring the Stranger here, now, to bring him closer to the truth. The Plan has opened a door in front of him and he would be a fool to ignore it. And if he never has to set foot in Edgewater again, so much the better.

When Max takes his leave, he makes it quick and to the point. The Unreliable’s bulky frame looms overhead, a black, formless silhouette with a single light on the entry door. Somewhat less inviting than he expected. The interior makes him question his decision for a different reason: the dust. How does Hawthorne live like this? “Beggars can’t be choosers, I suppose,” he mutters.

“You must be the new crewmember,” booms an oddly artificial voice from a nearby speaker.

“Laws above!”

“I’m ADA, the ship’s artificial intelligence,” it continues. “The Captain has told me all about you. Your room is located on the second floor, third from the right.”

Max lets out a breath he’d been holding. “Thanks, I think. Do I want to know what he said about me?” he asks. He can’t help being curious.

“I’m afraid that’s classified information, Max.”

Seems that ADA’s got eyes just about everywhere, as he finds when he takes a cursory investigation of the ship. There doesn’t appear to be one of those funny little cameras in his room, but for some reason, that doesn’t entirely put him at ease. Max puts that thought aside for the time being. He’s got things to unpack, and he’s bone-tired besides. Not that it ends up taking long. A vicar’s life is decidedly ascetic, and material keepsakes come few and far between. No, the bulk of his personal belongings is made up of texts that would both bore the pants off the average reader and possibly get him excommunicated. The collection’s his pride and joy. His tossball card collection is a close second, however.

One had to wonder just how long Hawthorne and Parvati had been running around together before they ran into him, on account of the density of leafy things taking up space in Parvati’s room already. (Not that Max was so uncouth as to snoop.) The two of them return the next day, when the vicar is debating whether or not it would be ethical to eat the lone can of saltuna in the fridge without asking. He decides it wouldn’t be.

“Hey, Mr. Vicar. How’s the ship treatin’ you? We’re just about to get her up and runnin’ again,” Parvati says with an aborted wave, arms otherwise full with a very large, very scientific-looking cylinder. Presumably the power core.

“It’s… interesting,” hedges Max. “I’m not sure it’s what I expected. Then again, it has been a long time since the last time I was inside something like this.”

She nearly drops it from surprise. “You been in a spaceship before?”

Before he can answer, Hawthorne gingerly steadies her, then takes the core himself. “Parvati, why don’t I take this and go install it? Go get a shower or something. The Vicar’s been giving us weird looks since yesterday, so, ah, we might offend.”

Parvati says, “I didn’t know you knew how to do that,” at the same time Max bursts out, “I’ve been doing no such thing,” a total falsehood. She heads off at that, but Hawthorne doesn’t.

He sits at the table, taking a seat orthogonal to Max, and sets the core on the ground. Then he rests his elbows on the table and folds his hands in front of his face, obscuring his mouth. The look he gives Max is filled with a strange cold intent. It’s like he’s searching for something, eyes flickering minutely from left to right.

“Can I help you, Captain?” says Max at last.

“How good are you at keeping a secret, Max?”

“That would depend on the secret, I think. Does this have anything to do with all the, ah,” he trails off, gesturing at all the mess.

That startles a laugh out of the Captain. “What? No. That was just- there was a, well, an incident. With some marauders. What I’m talking about is a little bigger than that.” His hands drop, fingers laced together. They’re deceptively small. Graceful, even. “Do you know who I am, exactly?” Hawthorne asks him.

“Not exactly. To be frank, I don’t know much about you at all.”

“And you’re coming with me anyway?”

He nods, and Hawthorne suddenly breaks out in a toothy smile. “Wow. You must be out of your mind. Or maybe just desperate? You’re in luck, then, because I like a guy who’s desperate,” he beams. Max’s ears burn at that. _Embarrassment?_ That’s something he hasn’t felt in a dog’s age.

“I’d prefer ‘enthusiastically devoted’,” Max attempts, but it doesn’t wipe the shit-eating grin off Hawthorne’s face.

“Whatever you want to call it. Anyway, the point is, I need somebody with a little discretion, and I imagine you fit the bill,” he says, then leans in to add, “so, here’s the deal: I’m not supposed to be here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m supposed to be dead. Frozen out in space, or liquefied, or something. I’m not one-hundred percent sure about the specifics. But somebody found me and brought me back - back from being in cryosleep, I mean. I was asleep for _decades_,” he breathes.

Max frowns, gears turning in his head. “Decades… You don’t mean you were on some kind of colony ship? Like the Hope?”

“That’s the one.”

“You must be joking.”

The warmth vanishes from his face like a set of steel shutters being slammed closed. “Do I look like I tell jokes, Vicar?” No, judging from the flat line of his mouth, perhaps he doesn’t. Max doesn’t have the chance to say as much before he continues. “Let me know if this sounds funny to you, then: there’s hundreds of thousands of people left frozen on the Hope. I’m just the first to wake up. And I’m going to bring them all back.”

The most frightening thing, Max reflects later in the privacy of his bunk, is that Hawthorne believes he can actually do it. Really, genuinely believes it. And that he himself was willing to abandon his entire life at the drop of a hat to help make Hawthorne’s will be done. Law help him.


	2. Roman à Clef

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> max gets accustomed to his new life on the unreliable. also, i make good on the tank top thing.

_(adj.) absential - The paradoxical intrinsic property of existing with respect to something missing, separate, and possibly nonexistent._

The thrill of taking off and leaving his old life behind is heady, but dies a bit when Hawthorne coaxes the Unreliable into groaning, shuddering, and bobbing woozily into the air without so much as a warning. It makes him spill his tripicale tea.

Hawthorne’s voice crackles over the intercom. “Okay, we’re in business. Hang onto your seatbelts - wait, do we have seatbelts? Christ, OSHA would have a field day in here,” he mutters.

Parvati tightens her grip on a handrail. “Who the heck’s Osha?” she asks the Vicar, but he wouldn’t be able to answer that even if he could. Abrupt G-forces will do that to you.

They’re bound for the colony ship Groundbreaker, after what their Captain described as a “quick pit stop”. Outside the barred windows, a field of asteroids hangs suspended against the rosy pink backdrop of open space. Out here he can make out each individual pinprick of light. The Unreliable rounds the corner of a large bit of debris and threads itself into a curious structure, a docking bay of some kind inside a hollowed-out asteroid.

The inside is no more welcoming than the outside, littered as it is with cystypigs in various states of preservation. The things look riddled with disease, although Max knows that’s just an unfortunate consequence of genetics. They can’t help it. One’s even still alive, somehow, trotting around the lab absent-mindedly. Parvati makes a quiet noise and pats it on the snout.

“So you really did make it back in one piece,” comes a tinny voice from behind a thick clear enclosure. On closer inspection, it comes from a frazzled man with his arms folded and his hairline receding. Something about his face rings a bell in Max’s mind. “I’m impressed. Although I must say, you didn’t have to come straight here. Can't ADA just beam you through to me?”

“Nice to see you too,” Hawthorne says flatly.

“Now, who is this? You didn’t tell me you were bringing anyone with you. Tell them not to touch anything!”

Parvati clears her throat. “Uh, we can hear you. Sir.”

“They’re helping me. So by extension, they’re helping you. You could be a little more grateful, Dr. Welles.”

The doctor throws his arms up into the air. “Oh, of course, of course. Just bring any old ruffians you find into my top-secret hideout, that’s a smart idea,” he says. Max’s brow furrows, recalling a certain set of posters in Edgewater’s village square.

“Dr. Welles? You don’t mean the Dr. Welles with the sizable bounty on his head, do you?” Max asks, before Hawthorne can spit out whatever unpleasant thing he had loaded in response. “You certainly keep interesting company, Captain.”

“The very same! Which is why I’m not very fond of visitors,” Dr. Welles confirms.

Hawthorne rolls his eyes, then strikes up some kind of conversation about chemicals and cryogenics that exceeds Max’s grasp of the subjects in record time. He catches Parvati’s eye, and she shrugs helplessly and shakes her head. “I’m an engineer, not a chemist,” she whispers to him. Terms like _dimethyl sulfoxide_ and _vitrification_ and _dismutation_ slip out of Hawthorne with a practiced ease. It’s both jarring and fascinating to watch. Nothing about the Captain struck him as particularly academic, and most of the other eggheads Max has been acquainted with are not nearly so… bold.

He only snaps out of it when Hawthorne complains, “Seriously? I’ve been tasting nothing but garlic for a week now. You can’t tell me that’s supposed to be normal.”

“Seeing as our sample size is one - you - I’d say it’s actually perfectly normal,” reassures Welles.

“That’s not— That’s not how a norm works— Oh my God, forget it. Fine. Hit up Gladys, get a NavKey, and pick up the DMSO. Shouldn’t be a problem, right?” He turns toward Parvati and Max when he asks this, and they nod as if they have any idea what he’s talking about. Doesn’t sound too complicated on the surface. However, Max has a nose for this kind of thing, and he suspects the Plan won’t end up being that simple.

Upon their return to the ship, Max chooses to spend his time poring over the journal, picking out cognates and fruitlessly attempting to divine their meanings. It tempts him like an inscrutable puzzle box. And much like a puzzle box, he’s also tempted to say, _to hell with the whole thing_, and chuck it at a wall. But he is patient. It’s a learned skill, like knowing when to press his eyes into his open palms and just stay there like that in the darkness. Makes that burgeoning headache slink back to where it came.

Philosophism tends to cause that reaction in people. It’s marked by what Max considers a tenuous connection to the practical sciences, or, indeed, to reality, in the most extreme examples. But there are some authors whose lenses let Max view the world in a different resolution, something like getting the bigger picture. Expanding his local senses to understand the whole of the elephant.

According to scholars of teleodynamics, there are a number of distinct gulfs in existence that, once crossed, fundamentally change the relational nature of matter. Life, for one thing - in one moment, far in the past, all matter followed simple thermodynamic laws, and in the next, living creatures formed. There was no such thing as an end to even be striven for, and then suddenly there was. Some curious artifact of self-organization gave birth to a slew of end-directed processes that transformed the very earth and stars around them. The exact origins of life remain a mystery despite thousands of years of consideration, and some OSI clergy believe that a more thorough understanding of the Plan will shed some light on that inexplicable transition.

Similarly, humanity’s emergence onto the scene created a radical discontinuity between the world before and the world after. Words, pigments, tools, and art blossomed into being and left their own indelible marks. Entirely new forms could be wrought for a specific purpose. Hands breathed life into clay bowls, jugs, empty vessels and such, with their physical properties determined by how well they satisfy a desired outcome: holding a liquid without spilling or leaking. Metals could soon be smelted and refined to purities impossible in nature, or at least highly improbable, and arranged into similarly improbable structures. Behavior could be organized on both micro- and macro-scales to realize ends vaster than ever before. Something in the fabric of the world _changed_.

It was teleology inflicted from without, rather than within. Means no longer determined ends alone - ends began to determine means. The causal order of the universe appeared to reverse, as if a possible future was reaching back through time to shape the present.

This is, of course, heretical nonsense. For the most part, all acts are preordained, and those that aren’t are swiftly brought back into line with the expected trajectory of the universe. The Philosophists may have an elegant way with words, but Max has watched the metaphorical rubber band snap back into place over and over again. Attempting to control future outcomes was a futile endeavor and arrogant besides. Humility is a virtue, after all, and all things ultimately have a purpose in the Grand Plan, so there isn’t any use in fighting it. So they say.

He’s always had a hard time doing what he’s told, however. ADA steers them to Groundbreaker as he stews over what Bakonu could mean by _réalisabilité multiple_.

When they step onto the landing bay, Max looks up at the high, high ceiling and feels his stomach drop, taken aback by the sheer size of the thing. He’s never had reason to be afraid of heights before, but seeing the floor drop out into black nothingness at his sides is making him reconsider.

“Oh, wow,” Parvati breathes, “I never imagined what it would be like to be inside one of these things. I can’t believe we- we’re really in space! Hah!”

“You know, Ms. Holcomb, I almost have a hard time believing this is the same woman who used to give me one-word answers,” Max ribs her.

She visibly recedes back into herself like a turtle into its shell. “Shoot, sorry! I just, I got so excited, I forgot myself.”

Max doesn't think she should apologize, but comfort doesn't come easy to him, and an awkward amount of time has already passed before he thinks of something that strikes the right chord of gentle paternality. He tries to pat her shoulder instead. It's uncomfortable for both of them.

The promenade itself is just as dazzling as the dock to her - great glowing signs span over every free inch of real estate, championing brands from C&P to T&B in fantastic colors. It’s alive and abuzz with commerce and spacers of all stripes, and Max suspects he hasn’t seen this many people in one place since his prison days. Sweat starts to pool at the base of his collar while he takes it all in. All those lights must be giving off an awful lot of heat. The two of them surely stand out, a pair of yokels agog, but Hawthorne hangs back from them with a foul expression on his face. Max pauses to let him catch up.

“Something the matter, Captain?”

Hawthorne drags his eyes away from a chunk of signage with an odd physicality. “I have to admit, this isn’t what I thought it would be,” he says. He pushes a shaggy clump of black hair back from his forehead, where it’s gone a bit limp from the humidity. “Is everything here affiliated with some kind of brand?”

“Probably. Where else are they supposed to get their products from?” Max answers, suppressing a laugh. All academics have their blind spots, he supposes, and the passage of time may have made Hawthorne's especially glaring.

“That… answers a lot of questions for me, actually.” Max would love to know which questions he’s talking about, but he doesn’t elaborate. Instead, he claims, “All these lights are giving me a goddamn headache,” and leads them into a dingy, hole-in-the-wall kind of hostel. Trash litters the corridors in curiously-shaped cubes, and there’s at least one person digging through it for something to eat. That bodes well. Nothing like the smell of stale smoke and garbage to remind him of home.

* * *

10,000 bits. That’s the number Hawthorne repeats to himself, a little incredulous, as he leans back in his chair and stares at the ceiling tiles of The Lost Hope. It’s a big ask for something as simple as a NavKey, but Gladys wouldn’t budge on the price, even after Max offered her some of his own “professional tossballer” hair for her throw pillow collection. Hawthorne’s howl of laughter at that didn’t help.

Normal people just don’t have that kind of money. However, he’s starting to realize that they aren’t exactly “normal people” anymore. Normal people don’t watch their Captain vaporize an entire bottle of Zero Gee Ale in one go, and they certainly don’t encourage him to do it again.

“This thing’s wild,” Hawthorne gasps, after he yanks his breather back off his face. A wisp of alcoholic vapor curls up to the ceiling. “You can vape _anything_ out of this. You want to try?”

He holds it out to Parvati first. She puts a hand up and shakes her head. “Uh, no thanks, Captain. Are you sure that’s safe?”

“The - _hic_ \- the fuck do I care if it’s safe? It’s fun. More fun than being shot to death, anyway,” he says. One limp-wristed hand waves around dismissively, while the other pushes his breather in Max’s general direction. “S’more cost effective than plain old getting drunk, too. More surface area in your lungs for the alcohol to get to. It’s science.”

“I appreciate the offer, but I think I’ll pass,” Max says, eyebrows raised. He doesn’t know enough about biology to dispute this, but there must be some truth to what he says, because Hawthorne’s developing a solid flush and he looks dangerously close to tipping his chair over. Max nudges him forward a little. Let no one say he’s not a kind person at heart.

They’ve got a couple of leads to pursue if they want to make some money, all of which Max finds questionable at best. SubLight made them a lucrative-sounding offer on a salvage contract, and Gladys has her fingers in a number of pies that they could fetch for her, but those plans are stymied by whichever asshole decided to ground the Unreliable when they docked. The least questionable of them proves to be right here on Groundbreaker, and it has a particular urgency: dealing with the station’s heat problems. So it wasn’t just him suffering after all. No wonder the stevedores and mardets eschewed long sleeves, and, in some cases, pants.

Perhaps they’ve got the right idea, he thinks, as Hawthorne’s red face starts to look less like intoxication and more like heatstroke. Max settles for removing the outer layer of his vestments in the restroom, not having much in the way of casual clothing otherwise. (The pants stay on.) It gets folded as neatly as he can manage, under the circumstances. Max reckons he stands out less in a greying tank top than in bright blue vicar’s robes, anyway. And what was it the Captain had said earlier? Discretion.

That said, he expects the Captain to be discreet. He and Parvati manage to subvert that expectation entirely, both stopping in the middle of an otherwise engaging conversation to turn their heads toward him and gawk. It makes some of the other patrons turn round, too, but thankfully they don’t find him quite as interesting as the tossball game on the big screens.

“Whoa,” Parvati starts. She rubs at her eyes with the heel of her palm. “I didn’t know vicars were allowed to wear stuff like that.”

“Stuff like what? Did you think I only owned one outfit?” asks Max, bewildered.

“Well, kinda? I ain’t ever seen you in anything else. I figured it was like a mascot costume kind of deal.”

“A— A _mascot costume_?”

She nods like that’s not the most offensive thing he’s heard in his life.

He looks to Hawthorne for moral support. Instead of that, however, he finds that Hawthorne’s doing that thing again - scanning him, for lack of a better word, those sharp purple eyes flicking from side to side. The hairs on the back of his neck prickle in uncomfortable awareness. There was something he was going to say, he’s sure, but it’s up and vanished on him.

Max doesn’t notice how long they’ve gone quiet until Parvati waves a hand between them. “Hey, guys? What’s goin’ on?”

“Nothing,” Hawthorne says, quick as a primal trap. “Just thinking that the Vicar might be onto something. This cryosuit is killing me. Does anyone sell some decent clothes around here?”

As it turns out, no. But mediocre clothes are in abundance, as are mediocre weapons and mediocre food. A step up from Edgewater, in honesty. They may not have 10,000 bits on hand, but they have enough for Hawthorne to suit up like a regular human instead of someone who crawled straight out of an adventure serial. Max can’t help a twinge of disappointment at that. It had its appeal. The three of them dip in and out of the various promenade establishments, and as they do, the Plan starts to crystallize in his mind’s eye. Not Hawthorne’s plan, necessarily - that was but a vehicle that Max could use to further his own ends. It brought him here, after all. And _here_ is the last place his scholarly companion was sighted. It’s a term too good for the rat bastard who led him on this wild goose chase, wasting his life in Edgewater for a book he can’t even read, but it’s the term he’s sticking with to keep Hawthorne off his back.

All they have to do is sneak into the security office, hack into Groundbreaker’s logs, hope that they still contain a reference to a Mr. Reginald Chaney’s departure, and get out without being noticed. No problem. He knows a thing or two about computers, at least, so that’s one part in four taken care of. Casing the place like this should make step one easier. In theory.

Their captain, however, has other ideas. “Oh, don’t worry about it. I picked up a little something while we were taking a look around,” Hawthorne says, as he digs around in his pockets. He pulls out a little white cartridge and sticks it somewhere inside his shirt. It makes a satisfying click. “Check this out. We’re just going to walk right in and take them.”

“Just walk in and take them. Right. Where ever do you get these clever ideas, Captain?” asks Max.

Parvati cranes her head to get a better look at which orifice, exactly, that cartridge had disappeared into. “Ooh, is this that gadget you were talkin’ about? I kinda can’t believe it’ll work, but I’m real curious to see it in action anyway,” she grins.

_What gadget?_ Max thinks. Hawthorne intrudes on that train of thought, huffing, “Keep talking shit, Max. I’m going to walk right in there and get those logs or whatever, because I can do whatever I want and there isn’t really anybody that can stop me. Does that sound good to you?”

“That is… the most arrogant thing I’ve ever heard,” Max says slowly. “And possibly the stupidest. You know what, be my guest. I can’t wait to see this.” Anger swells up in the pit of his chest and lingers there. One doesn’t need to have an ecclesiastical background to know that you can’t just fucking do whatever you feel like, but maybe a little firsthand education will put Hawthorne in his place. Snap the band.

When Hawthorne presses a button, that gadget of his plays a strange trick on the eyes, convinces him and all the other mardets that he’s dressed in a full set of regulation armor, and he just… goes for it. They let him do it. Max watches the clock with held breath, waiting for that snap. He knows it’s coming. Any second now, the Captain’s going to fumble it. Somebody’s going to look too closely. He’s going to trip over his own shoe. Anything, for Law’s sake.

Nothing of the sort happens, though, and it’s _infuriating_. He walks right in and takes the departure logs and there isn’t anybody that can stop him. Max can’t even be properly thankful when Hawthorne presses a data cartridge into his hand, because he sees the smug, insufferable look on his Captain’s face and he could just punch his lights out for it. But no. He’s not going to give him the satisfaction.

He’ll take this as a lesson in humility, he decides, as he grits out his thanks. Just because Hawthorne doesn’t get what’s coming to him now doesn’t mean that he won’t, eventually. Max should know better than to take his immediate circumstances for the end result of the Plan.

Besides, there are bigger fish to fry now. When they return to the Unreliable for the night, Max confers with ADA to analyze the cartridge’s contents. Turns out that Reginald Chaney’s last recorded departure was quite a long time ago, and on board a flight to Fallbrook, of all places. He scoffs to himself. Chaney would go run and hide in a den of degeneracy and vice, wouldn’t he. All things end up where they should in the end. It’s the order of things.

Say what Hawthorne will, but he ascribes too much of his success to his own self. As if his own free will superseded the natural order of the universe. An incomprehensible notion. No, nothing would have gone so smoothly if it hadn’t been so ordained, it just doesn’t make sense. If everyone could get away with doing whatever brazen or foolish thing they wanted, there would be a lot fewer deaths by raptodon, for one thing. It was nothing more than the right convergence of atoms and coincidences. In the words of geneticists of old, they themselves were nothing more than the predictable behavior of vast assemblies of nerve cells and their associated molecules, the emergent consequences of those same atoms and coincidences. All that they are, all that they do is determined by the Equation.

And yet, Max ruminates in the dead of the ship’s artificial night cycle, he believes he’s present, somewhere, behind his skull. His mind doesn’t feel like an algorithm running on a biological computer analogue, taking inputs and reporting canned outputs. He chooses his words and actions on more than mere impulse. He's a man bound by countless ententional phenomena, his very being defined by that which he isn't, that which he is striving for. He himself must be real. Something more than illusion or gloss. Chaney’s going to help him prove it, one way or another.

* * *

When Max wakes some hours later, he goes through his usual morning rituals, but he doesn’t fully notice the strange man sitting at the table and eating his food until he attempts to take his tea and finds it missing. A beat passes while his brain struggles to process it.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Oh, I’m Felix,” says the man apparently named Felix. He takes a bite of a mock apple and crosses his legs on the table. “Captain Hawthorne let me on board. I’m your new crew guy. Crew-hand? Crew-buddy? Whatever you wanna call me. Nice to meetcha.”

It’s been - it hasn’t even been six full hours since the last time he saw the Captain, and he’s already picking up strays? Nobody keeps him posted about a void-damned thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> max references a quote from francis crick near the end: "You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules…"


	3. Raison d'Être

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> hawthorne's getting pretty sick of groundbreaker, and max wrestles with himself a lot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy holidays everyone... this one's a little longer than usual to make up for the wait. there's a lotta talking and arguing
> 
> max dips into the more, uhh, homophobic and eugenics-y side of OSI beliefs here, just as a warning. he's working on it.

_(n.) entelechy - An active principle that guides the development of an embryo into its final form; a general formative potential that tends to realize itself._

Max cranks the shower lever as far to the cold side as it’ll go. What with the ambient temperature approaching “sweltering”, however, the water it spits out in uncertain spurts is closer to lukewarm. Not too pleasant, but it will have to suffice. At least he feels better after scrubbing the worst of the grime off. Cleanliness is next to orderliness, after all, and something about shaving his face bare and parting his hair just so in the mirror makes him feel a little closer to the divine. Small rituals.

Their Captain appears to be waiting for him in particular when he gets out, fingers drumming on the kitchen table. “What took you so long? You sick or something?” he asks.

“I wasn’t aware you were waiting on me.”

“Uh, yeah? I’ve been waiting on you and Parvati for the past, like, eight hours. Groundbreaker isn’t exactly going to fix itself,” says Hawthorne, so impatient that his chair screeches against the floor as he rockets to his feet. Max rubs some of the residual tiredness from his eyes and inspects the Captain more carefully. There’s a curious sway that he quickly corrects, and dark rings in the hollows of his eyes.

He approaches the Captain nice and slow. “Did you sleep at all last night, Captain?” Max asks.

“What? Yeah, sure. Like a baby. Now hurry up and eat something. I picked up enough stuff to keep us going for a few days.” He gestures to the fridge, which Max opens to find it laden with tins of gourmet saltuna, loaves of Bred, an unreasonable quantity of energy drinks, and fresh spratwurst. Too fresh. In all his years, he’s rarely seen a civilian with that much food in one place.

For a good, long while, he stares at it, not certain he isn’t imagining things, then he glances back at Hawthorne. “A few days? This could feed an army,” Max points out. “Do I want to know where you got all this?”

Hawthorne pulls a Knock-You-Out bar out of his pack and unwraps it to snap a large chunk off with his teeth. “Probably not,” he mumbles around it.

“Fair enough.” Best not to look a gift canid in the mouth, he supposes. Besides, he can barely remember the last time he ate his fill, so he does as much, with Hawthorne’s approving eyes on him the whole time. That kind of surveillance puts some pressure on him to get it done quick.

Parvati and Felix await them outside the Unreliable, and Max feels a bit put off by how quickly the two of them have struck up an amicable conversation. Every word out of Felix’s mouth is somehow more irritating and ignorant than the last. But Parvati doesn’t seem to mind, or even notice, really. She _laughs_ with him, even.

Max comes this close to snapping at them to stop talking about Dissident Hunter for two seconds, please, before Hawthorne leads them to the Groundbreaker’s engine room, where the air around them shimmers in waves from the residual heat. Harried and sweaty engineers hustle from unit to unit in a frenzied effort to keep her systems from giving up the ghost. And the noise, it's unbearable, a cacophonous clanking and groaning and humming.

A woman with black hair tied up in a bun looks up from her console at them and waves them over. She introduces herself as Junlei Tennyson, and she’s got a brusque, practical manner that endears herself to Max immediately, as well as copious amounts of grease on her face. However, those same qualities seem to make Parvati trip over herself, dizzy and torturous. He shoots a sidelong glance at the Captain. Who, against all good sense, smirks in response and gives Parvati an encouraging clap on the back.

Max’s eyebrows draw together. He’s more than happy to watch her embarrass herself, personally.

“I— Y-Yeah, sure, I could do that! Give you my email, I mean. Um. And we could talk! That is, uh, if you have the time? Whenever! Fine by me! J-Just, y’know, I know you’re awful busy with fixin’ up Groundbreaker and all, so don’t—”

Junlei cuts her off. “I’d be happy to make time for you, Parvati,” she says.

“How sweet,” says Hawthorne, voice dripping with... something. He sounds the way Auntie Cleo's toothpaste smells, sweet and cloying and kind of like it'll make you sick if you leave it in there too long. Max finds it a baffling trick of the tongue. “Parvati, why don’t you stick around here and pick up some pointers? We could use some of Junlei’s expertise.”

Her eyes go wide. “Huh? Wha— I-I couldn’t. She’s got so much to do right now! Don’t you?” she pleads.

“Captain—” Junlei catches herself mid-word. “Captain Hawthorne’s taking a lot off my shoulders right now. So, like I said. I can make some time.” She smiles at Parvati, who looks like she’s about to faint.

“Go on, we’ll get this radiator shit sorted out. Have fun,” Hawthorne grins, and the three of them take their leave.

By some miracle of thermodynamics, the promenade is thankfully cooler, and Max takes a moment to lean against the elevator wall and wipe the sweat off his forehead. His shirt’s already soaked through. Disgusting. This whole affair loses its shine when they’re sweating like stuck cystypigs.

“So, uh, what’s up with Parvati? Isn’t she supposed to be the one who knows all about parts and stuff? Why didn’t you want her comin’ with us?” Felix pipes up, words tumbling out in a single stream.

So Felix has some minimal powers of observation. He has to admit, he’s surprised. “I was wondering the same thing, Captain.”

Hawthorne stares, his eyes jumping between them in a rapid back-and-forth motion. Then his mouth purses. “Is this a joke? I told you, I don’t really do jokes.”

“No jokes here, boss.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Okay,” Hawthorne says slowly, “so, you’re both telling me that neither of you could read the room?”

Max frowns at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” From Felix’s shrug, he’s not much better off, either.

“She’s— For God’s sake, guys. They’re _gay_,” he says, waving his hands in the air for emphasis. “They’re complete lesbians for each other, alright? You’re really telling me you couldn’t pick up on that? I was trying to play wingman - and doing a fantastic job, might I add!”

That makes the last piece of the puzzle click into place. He hadn’t - he hadn’t even considered it within the realm of possibility. Max considers himself a thoughtful and observant person, and the idea of a social context being lost on him unnerves him more than he likes. He’s hardly _ignorant_.

“Oh. That’s cool,” Felix says, folding his hands behind his head.

“You can’t be serious,” Max mutters. Hawthorne hones in on him with a laser focus, and he folds his arms, defensive. “Captain, you can’t just encourage her to pursue whatever whims she feels like, and damn the consequences. We need all the help we can get, and you’re letting our most capable engineer waste her time on - on some Law-forsaken fancy!”

Hawthorne narrows his eyes at him and says, “There’s no way you just said what I think you said,” before pinching the bridge of his nose and taking a deep breath. “Christ, we are not having this conversation right now. I’m the Captain now, got it? What I say goes. If you don’t like it, you’re free to look for another ship out of here.”

Max raises his eyebrows in disbelief, but finds it wisest to say nothing as Hawthorne walks past him into the elevator and slams its lever down. Point taken.

* * *

Just as all other religious organizations that came before it, the OSI proscribes a number of dangerous and heretical behaviors. In times past, these behaviors were dictated by cultural and environmental circumstance - the consumption of unclean foods, the worship of idols, the use of a god’s name in vain. As an enlightened people, however, the Order has done away with most of these archaic restrictions. The value of a religious edict is now determined in purely quantitative terms. Above all, the question that must be asked is, _does this act maintain the natural order of the universe?_

Under that light, banning texts which threaten the OSI’s ideological underpinnings is only the rational thing to do. The average person, Max has found, lacks the educational background to properly make use of Philosophist teachings, and a spark of knowledge to the unwashed masses is a dangerous thing indeed. He likes to consider himself the exception that proves the rule. In the hands of the right person, any weapon can be put to good use.

However, this is hardly the only guideline Max is expected to follow. As a member of the Order, he is not to pursue higher ambitions, not to speak to anarchists, communists, or other degenerates, and not to organize his books in any way other than alphabetical order. And he is most certainly not to engage in homosexuality and all its sister forms of deviancy.

The ideal relationship is engineered by one’s parent brand for maximum genetic efficacy, or, in the case of the lucky Byzantines, arranged for the consolidation of social and financial capital. Deviating from the Plan can only lead to chaos. Like little bastard children, like Parvati, _love children_, weak-willed and supine and destined to be chewed up and spat out by the Equation.

It’s the natural order of things. A man, a woman, carefully selected by the finest of the Board’s sorting algorithms, manipulating natural selection as mankind has for millennia in an effort to mold humanity into the perfect breed of Auntie Cleo’s factory workers.

Max is an exemplar of the new form, keen of mind, with a mostly-consummate physique; a bad knee might give him guff at times, but that’s hardly a consequence of poor breeding. Just poor decision-making versus a non-regulation osmium tossball stick. It would be sacrilege for a man like himself to give in to filth and debauchery and the temptation of a locker room full of tossball players in sweaty, Hellenistic repose. (What the Order doesn’t know about his penitentiary stint won’t hurt them, though. It’s a thing of the past.)

All his ideal traits don’t amount to much in the face of a handful of very angry dissidents with very large guns aimed directly at their heads, however. Their self-proclaimed king, MacRedd, uses the barrel of his gun to scratch an itch under his blacked-out goggles.

"Whoa-ho, back up, little man,” MacRedd leers. The rough grate of his voice sets Max on edge. “You come down to my territory, you play by my rules. The hell’s a cyborg like you doin’ down here, anyway?”

Hawthorne makes a sound like he’s laughing, but the flat line of his mouth doesn’t budge. “That’s flattering. Put down the guns before you blow your head off, dumbass.”

Unsurprisingly, none of them listen. A woman on their right flicks a switch on the side of her pistol, and a glowing coil whines to life. “That’s no way to talk to the king, baby. My buddy here’s got an itchy trigger finger, and she’d be happy to wash your mouth out for ya,” says MacRedd, jabbing a thumb in her direction like they're dense.

“What, do you want me to get down on one knee right now? We just want the spare radiator parts. Then we’ll get out of your hair, and it’ll be like we were never here,” Hawthorne bargains. It’s not so convincing when he’s tapping his foot in agitation.

“Nah, that ain’t gonna do. You know what they did for kings way back when, right? Brought ‘em offerings. So go ahead, cough it up. I think, ah, two thousand bits is a good start.”

“We don’t have time for this!” he bursts out. One hand scratches jerkily at his arm. “People are going to start dying if you don’t give us those parts, MacRedd. I don’t have time for you to fucking— to get off on playing games with us, or whatever the fuck this is—”

MacRedd rears back like he’s smelled something foul. “Don’t be fuckin’ gross, man. Shoot ‘em,” he tells his companions, and Max’s body reacts before he can think about it and he dives, tackling Hawthorne to the ground just as a bolt of plasma fire whistles above them.

“What is your_ problem?_” Max shouts over the chaos.

Hawthorne doesn’t dignify that with a response, instead rolling Max off of him so he can whip out his own piece. A dazzling light show of gunfire makes the dank halls howl and glow, peppering its hollows in ominous shades of red and white. His Captain's hands shake. Shots pop off in rapid bursts. They go wide and hit empty air, distressingly close to Max’s face.

He doesn’t know about the rest of them, but he’s not intent on being shot by his own Captain today, thank you. So Max knocks his pistol out of his hand when he goes to reload. He’s got his own weapon, a shotgun with all the aesthetic design of a construction site, and he yanks it off his back to fire in MacRedd’s general direction. Underneath him, Hawthorne lets out a furious sound.

Felix yelps and trips backwards over his own feet. “Guys, guys, hold on! It’s me, Felix! Don’t shoot me!”

Somehow, that works, and the dissidents all stop firing to call out, “Felix! Hey, it’s Felix!”

“Hey, buddy!” yells another.

“Felix, my man,” MacRedd says from behind a stack of crates. “I didn’t even see you there! What’s goin’ on?!”

“Get off me! Goddamn it, what’s happening?” Hawthorne snaps.

He relents, and the first thing Hawthorne does is grab his gun off the ground. “I don’t know, Captain, but I think we should take advantage of this.”

“You know these creeps?” MacRedd asks Felix.

“Uh, yeah. We’re cool. We’re all cool, right? Can I come out from under here?”

By the king’s grace, a ceasefire is declared, and Max offers a hand to Hawthorne to help him to his feet. A tension draws out between them while Hawthorne’s purple eyes rapidly scan him, line by line, but then he takes it. He leaves a smear of blood behind. It's a little repulsive, but for lack of options, Max wipes his hand on his shirt.

So, Felix knows MacRedd, MacRedd knows Felix, and everything’s all buddy-buddy now, and he isn’t going to die unceremoniously in a pile of mechanical refuse. The Plan works in mysterious ways, he supposes. “You’d think he would have brought this up sooner,” Max mutters to himself. Hawthorne snorts at that, abrupt and muffled behind his breather.

Retrieving what they came for is mercifully easier after Felix drops off to catch up with MacRedd, arms gesturing in wide arcs as he gushes about the “super awesome, seriously, I’ve got my own room and everything” ship that’s taken him on. Hawthorne takes a few minutes to observe a morass of tubes and wiring buried deep in the machinery of the Back Bays. There’s an uncertainty to his approach, but when he reaches in and pulls out a green, glassy device of some kind, nothing self-destructs or catches on fire, so that must be a good sign.

What isn’t a good sign is blood seeping through a tear in his Captain’s shirt, glistening in the light when they emerge back out of the darkness of the Bays.

“Captain,” Max starts, stating the obvious, “you’re bleeding.”

Hawthorne cranes his neck behind him to get a better look. “Huh. How about that,” he says. And then he keeps walking.

“Wait just a moment. Let me…” He trails off, distracted by Hawthorne actually listening to him for once and stopping to let him look. An ugly, ragged gash peeks out on closer inspection, bleeding sluggishly. “Laws. That’s going to get infected if you don’t take care of it. How are you even walking around like that?”

“For real? _You’re_ the one who shoved me into a bunch of broken junk, and you’re going to get on my case about this?”

Heat broils up Max’s neck and ears. Well, when he puts it like that, he sounds like an asshole, but he’s not about to apologize for doing the right thing. “I was trying to keep you from getting your head blown off!”

“Do you guys always fight like this?” Felix butts in. “I shoulda brought some popcale.”

They both look at him, then at each other, and they both spit out alternating “no”s and “yes”es before going silent.

It’s a relief when Hawthorne later acquiesces and lets Max drag them to the local clinic. Less so when the doctor on call stonewalls them, won’t even slip them a syringe of Adreno under the counter. That’s all they’ve got money for, anyway - Dr. Mfuru bursts out laughing when he checks the bits on Hawthorne’s only cartridge. _Wouldn’t even pay for the time I’d spend filling out the paperwork. _Max finds his attitude repellent, but can’t put a finger on why. They're broke, and penniless, jobless freelancers aren't high on the Board's list of charity cases. The doctor’s just fulfilling the order of things.

That also doesn’t seem to satisfy Hawthorne, who announces, once he's finished talking to the other woman in the clinic and they’re well out of earshot, “Okay, so, I’m thinking we sneak in and rob them blind. What say you?”

“Sounds sweet,” says Felix. “But, uh, how and why?”

“Let me answer that the other way around. The _why_ is, that guy pisses me off. And I can get a good look at that girl they’re holding hostage in there, too. There’s something shady going on in there, I can feel it. The _how_ is, we’re going to play some dress-up, and they won’t even know we’re there,” he explains.

“Ah. That.” Max wrinkles his nose.

“That?”

“Sound a little more excited about it, Max, Jesus. Just watch.” Hawthorne slips another cartridge into his shirt with that distinctive click, and in a flash of purplish light the three of them are bedecked in security uniforms and doctor’s coats. Max examines the detail on his arms and concludes that the facsimile isn’t so good up close, where light crackles and fizzes along the edges, but from a ways away, Hawthorne is the very picture of a Groundbreaker surgeon. He flexes a gloved hand with interest. Max expects a noise, but there is none.

Their Captain smiles at the two of them, then gestures for them to follow. His hands are deft and delicate, unlocking the doors to the clinic’s backroom with ease, and Max can’t help but watch them work.

* * *

After Parvati helps fix the Groundbreaker’s radiator problems, the temperature drifts back down into the ordinary, a-touch-too-cold ambience of empty space in the promenade, and more importantly, aboard the Unreliable. Max looks up from his reading at the distant sound of a fist - most likely Hawthorne’s - slamming into something in the kitchen. It prompts him to listen in closer. Not that he has to try very hard. The steel walls are exactly as thick as they need to be to satisfy Spacer’s Choice production standards, and not a millimeter thicker.

“Thought you said you were almost done, Dr. Fenhill,” Hawthorne groans, muffled. Max barely catches it.

“I told you, call me Ellie. And I was almost done. Now I’m just… more almost-done than before.” Their newest recruit, a bold, mercenary woman with surprisingly clear skin. Hawthorne’s got a strange magnetism to him. Draws in people with more recklessness than common sense.

“Don’t jerk me around right now. Please. I’ve had enough of that for one day. Goddamn— _ow_, goddamn Udom, and MacRedd, and that horrid little excuse for a clinic,” comes Hawthorne’s voice in one prolonged burst, like he’s forcing it through his teeth. “Where’s my inhaler?”

There’s a thump, and then Hawthorne swears. “Not until I’m finished. I don’t need you passing out on me,” Ellie tells him.

Silence falls over the ship again. Max returns to his text, an OSI treatise on biological development. It pulls from as far back as the ancient Greeks, an Earth people with an impressive grasp of the natural world. Theirs was the first window into the world of genetics - Aristotle spoke of an entelechy, something intrinsic to the embryo that shapes its final form regardless of environment. A seedling attempts to grow into a tree whether it’s twisted underneath a fence or bent out of shape by mountain winds. It would be impossible for it to deviate from the form embedded in its genes, its very atomic structure. Order dictates that all living things work the same way.

Max’s eyelids start to grow heavy just as Hawthorne knocks on his door frame. He must have lost track of the time. “Hey, Max,” he says, subdued in a way he hasn’t been since Max has known him. “Mind if we talk?”

“By all means. What’s on your mind, Captain?” Max asks, laying his book aside.

Hawthorne takes that as an invitation to close Max’s door behind him and take a seat at his small worktable, opposite him. He folds his hands in front of his mouth. Abruptly, Max notices his pupils, blown out and lidded over but still focused intently. The way Hawthorne watches him, it's like those games people play when they're young and stupid. Daring the other person to look away first. Max gets the feeling that the Captain usually wins.

He doesn’t speak for a while, and Max wonders if he should say something first, but he's beaten to the punch. “I wanted to say thanks,” Hawthorne starts, awkward and hesitant. “For looking out for me. I shouldn’t have lost my shit back there.”

A distinct, uncomfortable feeling like an egg cracking over his head washes over him, dripping down his scalp. It’s the contrition that feels so alien, he realizes. “Confession accepted, I suppose. But you hardly have to apologize to me. I mean, I should be the one apologizing to you. Looks like I’m going to give you one hell of a scar.”

Max catches Hawthorne grinning a little behind his slotted fingers. “Scars are cool, you know,” he says.

“If you say so.”

Hawthorne’s gaze drifts to Max’s open book, like he’s searching for what to say. Max gives him a moment to chew on it. He can be patient.

“Tell me more about this stuff. All this stuff you believe in,” Hawthorne says at last, gesturing at Max’s collection of texts.

“In specific, or in general?”

“Whatever floats your boat. I just want to hear it from the horse’s mouth.”

He mouths, _a horse?_, but doesn’t probe that further. “Well, if you’re so interested… You know I’m a vicar of the Order of Scientific Inquiry, of course. We believe in the rationality of the universe. Everything has a cause, stemming all the way back from the Big Bang. It’s all predictable from the singular Equation that determines every interaction in the universe,” he explains, as he has many times in the past. “We all have a place in the Plan. A purpose. And if we just follow the natural order of the world, we can realize that purpose.”

The Captain makes a dubious sound. “Right. And what, exactly, do you consider ‘the natural order’ of things?”

“All living things - and all the systems of the universe, really - tend towards a specific ordered state, and this state is defined by physical laws of nature. The Equation, if you will. It guides our development as humans, both in our physical form and in the trajectory of our lives. Those who obey the Plan the most faithfully end up the fittest for their environment. So they survive, and the weak perish. It's self-evident,” he finishes.

“Yeah, you’ve said that before. I'd call it _tautological_, myself, but I think that's just splitting hairs. What I'd like to know is, if you really think all that stuff, why are you sticking around me? Helping me out?” Hawthorne counters.

“What do you mean?”

“The strong live and the weak die. You said that. So why’d you try to save my skin earlier? Wouldn’t the natural order of things be to let me get shot? Since I was being such a mouthy little fucker?”

He doesn’t have an answer for that. In truth, he wasn’t even thinking about it. His body leapt into action before his brain could catch up. “I don’t imagine I would get much farther on my own journey if I didn’t keep an eye on you,” Max says eventually. “If you died on me, that would complicate things, I think.”

“Wow, how sweet of you,” says Hawthorne, voice flat.

“I’m simply being pragmatic. You could give it a shot once in awhile, Captain.”

“Don’t bullshit me,” he shoots back as he leans forward on his elbows. “You go on and on about the natural order, and the Plan, and whatever, but I don’t buy it. If you believed half the stuff you say to me, you wouldn’t be sitting here right now. You’d be back on Edgewater, wouldn’t you? You’d be practicing what you preach and forgetting all about this stupid book of yours.”

Max’s tone goes cold. “Do all of your apologies end with you demeaning the other person?”

“I’m not— I’m not trying to demean you! I mean, what I’m trying to say is, I know you’re a smart guy, Max. You’re the only person I’ve met so far who thinks about, well, anything this much,” Hawthorne says. His earnestness catches Max by surprise. “Science. Philosophy. The whys and hows. You guys from the Order might’ve smashed it all up into a weird, syncretic mess, but at least you’re thinking materially, right?”

“Right,” Max says slowly. He’s not certain how much offense he should take, so he reserves his judgment.

He continues, “Actions have consequences. And on a material level, we’re all just the end consequences of a process that’s been ticking since the start of the universe. It’s the only way things make sense from a scientific perspective. It can’t be weird that we exist. Or that our thoughts and wants exist. Those have got to have some kind of material basis, too. So why would the Plan end up with something that’s capable of conscious thought if that thought doesn’t actually matter, in the grand scheme of things? If it didn't matter what you did?”

Max doesn’t know what to say to that, either. It’s not every day that someone cuts straight to the root of his own tangled knot of doctrinal doubts. Nothing like the softballs he’s used to. Then again, Max reckons he shouldn’t be surprised. This was the man who had immediately challenged him with the ethical dilemma of the fate of an entire community. Bit of a workout, that one.

“I don’t have the answer to that yet,” he admits. He’s weighed the question in his mind long enough. “That’s part of the reason why I’m trying to get a hold of these Philosophist texts. They have… unique ways of looking at the world, but I’m certain that Bakonu, at least, has insights that would be helpful to the OSI. In the long run.”

Hawthorne's face lights up with amusement. “Is that what you tell them you’re up to?”

“Of course not. Most of the clergy doesn’t know what’s good for them.”

That gets a full-fledged laugh out of him for the first time all day. “Oh, I knew I liked you for some reason, Vicar,” he murmurs, like an afterthought. “But seriously, all this stuff about the Plan, it messes with your head, don’t you think? Makes you feel like there’s nothing you can do about anything. Everything sucks because that’s just the way it is, and that’s the way it’s always going to be.”

“Well, yes. That’s life. Life isn’t fair,” Max says.

“What kind of life is that? Why wouldn’t you want to make things better?”

He sighs. “It’s not as simple as that. There are circumstances beyond our control, and if we push the world’s boundaries too far, they will inevitably snap back into place. It’s like a rubber band—”

“Alright, I get it, the rubber band thing,” Hawthorne interrupts. “It doesn’t make any goddamn sense. You’re trying to have your cake and eat it too. Either everything’s predetermined or it isn’t!”

“Once again, it’s not that simple. All things in the universe obey certain trends, and any local deviations from that trend will eventually return to the mean. It never fails.”

Hawthorne pushes his hair back out of his face and groans. After a deep breath, he says, “Whatever you say, Max. You know what? I’m going to prove you wrong. To hell with the Plan! The world doesn’t have to be like this.”

“Sure, sure. Go ahead. Nothing but my support, Captain. Just tell me - what's your grand plan for changing the world, exactly?" Max asks, unable to stop his raised eyebrows and condescending tilt of the head.

The grin that Hawthorne shoots him sends a shiver down his spine, all teeth. “I’m going to burn the Board to the fucking ground.”

He lies awake in bed for a long, long time that night. The Plan brings him ill comfort.


End file.
